Friday, April 14, 2017

It was a pleasure to read a few poems to open the April PSSC program that featured Celeste McMaster. I started out, here, with a poem by Kate Daniels. It's always a joy to be among poet friends at the beautiful Charleston Library Society in downtown Charleston.

Friday, April 07, 2017

I'm happy to be reading a few poems to open tonight's Poetry Society of South Carolina (PSSC) program, which will feature poet CELESTE MCMASTER, who won the inaugural PSSC Summer Scholarship, an annual competition for members. For her selection by judge Lola Haskins, Celeste received full tuition to the 2016 Hub City Writing in Place Conference, a weekend event held every year in mid-July on the campus of Wofford College. While there, she studied with nationally known poet Kate Daniels, of Vanderbilt. Debbie Scott and I, of the PSSC Summer Scholarship Committee, would like to congratulate Celeste again for this honor!

Celeste is an associate professor at Charleston Southern University. She has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals, including The Dos Passos Review, New Delta Review, and Arkansas Review. She is also this year's winner of the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fiction Fellowship of the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

The Poetry Society of SC programs are held at The Charleston Library Society, 164 King Street, Charleston, SC, at 7 p.m. Typically they are on the second Friday of the month (Sept. - May), but this month is being held early because of the Easter weekend holiday next weekend. The readings are followed by a reception and book signing. They are free & open to the public.

January 5 – BrookgreenGardens: Nights of a Thousand
Candles (CLASS, 2016).Editor
Linda Ketron andphotographer Anne Swift Malarich will talk about the experience of
publishing this beautiful book celebrating Christmas and the winter holiday
season at BrookgreenGardens. Several contributors will
read a selection of their poetic responses to the book’s images.

February 2 – Jennifer Bartell; Len Lawson

Jennifer Bartell teaches at Spring ValleyHigh School in Columbia. She has an MFA from the University of South Carolina; and her poetry has
appeared in Callaloo, Pluck!, and the museum of americana, among others.

Len
Lawson is
the author of the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line
Press) and co-founder of the Poets Respond to Race initiative. Recent honors
include a fellowship from Callaloo Creative Writing. He teaches writing at CentralCarolinaTechnicalCollege.

March 2 – Jonathan Kevin Rice; open mic

Jonathan KEVIN Rice, of Charlotte, is a poet and visual
artist. His most recent poetry collection is Killing Time (Main Street
Rag, 2015). He is also the founding editor of Iodine Poetry Journal.

Open mic will follow Jonathan’s reading. All who attend
are invited to read one of their own poems. (Please keep your reading to a
single poem no longer than a page.) We’ll all look forward to hearing a variety
of voices, including yours. Please join in!

April 6 – Kate Daniels; Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry

Nationally
known poet KATE DANIELS, professor and Director of Creative Writing at VanderbiltUniversity, is the author of
several poetry collections—the latest, A Walk in Victoria’s Secret. Among her many honors
are a Guggenheim Fellowship and Pushcart Prize. She will offer a reading of her
poems, including her work in the new anthology Hard Lines: Rough South
Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2016). Introducing her
will be co-editor DanielCross
Turner, who will also talk about the anthology’s focus. Author George Singleton describes Hard
Lines as “a wonderful selection of writers
wrestling with, and extolling, the most intricate, beautiful, and perplexing
aspects of our South.”

Thanks to poet Kate Daniels, of Vanderbilt University, for making our last event of the 2017 Litchfield Tea & Poetry Series a finale that was truly grand. Yesterday she read some of her poems from the new anthology Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2016), as well as a selection of her other poems. Hard Lines was edited by Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright. This final program of the season was a celebration of the anthology, as well as of Kate's poems.

Please join us in 2018--on the first Thursday of Jan., Feb., Mar., and Apr.--for readings by a roster of talented poets from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Libby Bernardin and I have enjoyed coordinating each event this year. We're delighted to be joined next year by poet Cliff Saunders, who will work with us as a third coordinator. The three of us have lots of ideas for the coming year! Much gratitude to our cosponsors, The Waccamaw Neck Branch Library and The Poetry Society of South Carolina. Thanks, too, to Deloris Roberts for our receptions of delicious homemade confections and tea--and to co-founder Linda Ketron. The events are held at the lovely new library at 41 St. Paul Place, Pawleys Island. We look forward to our twelfth year of tea and poetry!

I'm excited to be a part of this lively event and look forward to meeting and reading with Robert Lee Kendrick. It's the last Pints & Poets reading of the semester for the Converse College MFA in Creative Writing program--a chance to celebrate National Poetry Month.

About Robert Lee Kendrick:Robert Lee
Kendrick grew up in Illinois and Iowa, but now calls South Carolina home. After earning his M.A. from IllinoisStateUniversity and his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, he held a number of jobs, ranging from
house painter to pizza driver to grocery store worker to line cook. He now
lives in Clemson with his wife and their dogs. His poems have appeared in Tar
River Poetry, Xavier Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, The
James Dickey Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook,
Winter Skin, was released in 2016 by Main Street Rag Publishing.

I was
honored to be asked to be one of the judges for the inaugural "Young Minds
Dreaming" Poetry Contest, sponsored by the South Carolina State Library. South
Carolina students in grades 3-12 were invited to submit poems
relating stories of a person, place, or an experience that made a mark on
student's lives.

There were nine judges. I judged the submissions from the 3rd
graders, a rich assortment of poems consisting of about 90 entries. Then the
three judges assigned to the elementary grades judged the top nine poems from
grades 3-5. Thank
you, students, for each poem--each flight of imagination--that I read! I look
forward to attending tomorrow's ceremony to cheer your talents and efforts.

Out of more than 600 SC student entries in the contest, offered for students grade 3 - 12, there are nine winners.

Elementary (grades 3-5)

1st Place - Sonia Baxter: "The Beach", 3rd grade, Round Top Elementary School

Last Saturday was the second Poetry Society of SC (PSSC) Writers' Group workshop of the year, when we continued our exploration of "Fishing for Poems," generating new work. We began by each creating a word bank of nouns and verbs we might want to use in the day's writing. We then spent working with our class packet. For our first writing activity we wrote our own lines in-between the lines of a published poem, all of us using the same poem, "Though I've Never Been to Gettysburg, by Gabrielle Calverossi. We used her poem, which was tripled spaced to give us writing room, as ghost lines that we took off from by paying attention to sound, rhythms, and whatever else struck a core. Our intent was to make associative leaps, not necessarily to respond to the poem or even pay attention to it content.

We also wrote an erasure poem, either from our own earlier freewriting or from two pages of prose from a book called Weather Wisdom. An erasure poem is typically quite spare, with deliberate care spent on which single words to choose. We each circled only the words from the paragraphs in the Weather Wisdom excerpt that we wanted to cause to bump up against each other with surprise and freshness to create the poem. All the rest from the prose was "erased." No rearranging of words and no adding of new words. It's like choosing which stones to step on while crossing a wide creek.

Fourteen participants attended the workshop. I'm always grateful for the poets' input, as well as their writing and camaraderie.

The next PSSC W.G. workshop will be on Saturday, September 30. Same place, same time.

SC Academy of Authors brunch, 2013

"Every door is a lesson in leaving...."

POETRY BOOKS:
My Dear, Dear Stagger Grass (2013), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors Prize. Finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize. Available at http://ciderpressreview.com.

Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006), winner of the SC Poetry Book Prize, judged by Terrance Hayes; the SIBA Book Award for Poetry; and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, judged by Rigoberto Gonzalez.

Lessons in Leaving, chapbook. Winner of the Persephone Press Book Award, judged by Brendan Galvin.

Other awards and prizes: the 2013 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner; the 2013 SC Academy of Authors' Carrie McCray Nickens Fellowship; and a 2011 Verna Ubben Fellowship to VCCA.